Menu:

This article appeared in Sacred Web 4. This issue is SOLD OUT. To order other back issues of Sacred Web, click here.

Online Articles

The Alchemy of Traditional Foods
by Rodney Blackhirst

And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face
shine, and bread that strengtheneth man’s heart... Psalm 104:15

One of the symptoms of the modern malaise, and one of the consequences
of the loss of integral wisdom, is the confusion that abounds
among people regarding food, diet and nutrition. It is generally recognized
that modern, industrial foods no longer nourish man as foods in
the past but traditional understandings of the proper sustenance for human
beings have, in all but a few parts of the world, disappeared. Modern,
industrial foods, processed and prepackaged, are increasingly the
norm. It was calculated several years ago that a new McDonald’s restaurant
opened somewhere on the Earth every seventeen hours of every
day of the year, and the rate is probably faster today. Against this, there
is a general hankering for more healthy foods and dietary habits, but
this is a response to concerns developed out of the methods and findings
of profane science, not out of an acknowledgement of a lost legacy
of traditional understandings. Similarly, many people are turning to vegetarianism
and more humane diets, but this is out of a squeamish horror
for new “factory” methods of meat production, not out of an appreciation
of the degree to which modern meat production violates and shuns
traditional notions of sacrifice and respect for the slaughtered creature.
Many are dabbling with exotic diets and even more are falling into various
fads. The scientists one day report that wheat grass cures cancer; the
next day that it causes it. More generally, people have lost the traditional
contacts with the past communicated through family recipes and food lore and the institution of the common table and, increasingly, even the
knowledge and skill to prepare sustaining meals from simple ingredients.
This is all a measure of alienation and of modern man’s rupture
from the guiding patterns of tradition.

Cooking and Cosmology
In a traditional order the preparation and understanding of food is a
cosmological art and science. It is kept within its own proper dimensions
and provided with a sacred context by some manner of revelation.
In the Judeo-Christian world the Book of Genesis provides man with the
right to enjoy the produce of the earth—though he must labour for it—
and both the Jewish and Christian religions derived from the Biblical
revelations are subsequently concerned, as a matter of doctrine, with
the sanctity of food. In traditional cultures everywhere the preparation
and eating of food is heavily ritualized and subject to divine regulation.
In the modern order, in contrast, food is simply a matter of utility, fashion
and sensual indulgence. The practice of giving thanks to the Creator
before a meal persists among marginalized groups of religionists but on
the whole modern man gives not a thought to where his food came from
and has not an inkling of its relevance to his spiritual as well as physical
well-being. The Semitic avoidance of pork seems a silly superstition and
the dietary strictures of Lent seem ridiculous inconveniences. More comprehensively,
modern man has no idea that there was once in the past,
and is still in some corners of the Earth, a science of nutrition derived
from a sacred cosmology. The strictures and taboos of religions set
boundaries; within those boundaries, in traditional cultures, flourish
cosmological arts and sciences based upon a sacred understanding of
nature. The modern health food movement is correct to point out the
short-comings of modern man’s divorce from nature, but his divorce
from the sacred was its prelude. The health food movement is a profane
reaction to the obvious inadequacies of the modern diet; it thinks in
terms of chemical constituents and vitamins. In the traditional mind “nature”
is, more importantly, Creation—foods are evidence of God’s mercy
and bounty, and the natural order reflects a sacred design with an exact
relation to the human being. Typically, the body of man is seen as a
microcosm of the greater cosmos, with both permeated with an identical
order that is itself of divine origin. When modern man sees a traditional Chinese meal being prepared he may think no more than “Yum! I
love stir-fry!” The health food enthusiast may take stock of the meal’s
protein content, minerals and enzymes and feel satisfied, in a sentimental
way, that it is full of “natural” ingredients. But a traditional man sees
the bowl of the heavens in the smooth, black concave form of the wok,
and he sees the grains of rice as stars and the vegetables—parsnips and
carrots cut as half-moons or hexagrams—as representatives of the planets.
He sees the stirring and agitation of the ingredients as mimicry of the
swirling courses of the heavenly bodies and the whole act of cooking as
a cosmological process in miniature. It is an act that participates in the
processes of a divine and intelligent creation. Traditional approaches to
foods place them within a wider cosmological context.

Categories of Food
In contrast to the approach of profane chemistry with its carbohydrates,
anti-oxidants and the like, traditional approaches understand the virtues
and vices of particular foods in terms of cosmological categories such as
the yin and yang of the Chinese. Some foodstuffs are classified as yin and some as yang and the balance of a diet is determined by avoiding
too much of one or the other or by countering foods that are strongly
yin with others that are strongly yang. The traditional European equivalent
to this was the system of four humors inherited from ancient Greek
sources. Some foods were regarded as hot, others as cold, some as dry
and others as moist, and their nutritional value was assessed in terms of
their action upon corresponding hot, cold, dry and moist humors and
organs of the body. The scientistic mind dismisses these systems as fumbling
attempts to uncover the secret order of nature revealed at last by
the chemists and geneticists. In fact, these systems were aspects of a
profound sacred science transmitting the wisdom of an ancient contemplation
of nature rooted in metaphysical principles. Something of the
four humor system still exists in the Muslim world where foods are described
as either hot (garmi) or cold (sardi), with four possible degrees
of each, with foods acting upon either the blood, the phlegm, the bile or
the black bile of the body. The classifications are not made on the basis
of crude chemical analysis but refer rather to essences (akhlat). The
heat and the cold are not measures of calories or energy with which the
modern physical sciences are concerned but are cosmic polarities inherent in all things of creation. Sometimes the shape, colour, habit of
growth or other factors are crucial in determining the value of the food.
Thus, for instance, plump, short-grained rice tends to be a hot (garmi)
food, but the longer grained varieties are cooler. Sometimes these
determinations arise directly from the recommendations of the Traditions
of the Prophet Muhammad, many collections of which are particularly
rich in food-lore. In one hadith, the Prophet is reported as having
said, “The main cause of disease is eating one meal on top of another.”
Apart from the obvious good sense of this saying, the Muslim tradition
has taken these words to refer to the mysteries of digestion which depend
upon the hot and cold essences. In particular, there must be an
appropriate amount of heat for the body to accomplish all of the transformations
of digestion; otherwise the body grows cold and the transformations
cease. Modern processed foods and the mainstays of the
modern Western diet—refined sugar, refined flour, beef, dairy products,
potato starch—are cold foods; typically the modern Western diet yields
only enough heat (garmi) to accomplish the crudest physical transformations
while the more subtle but vital qualities of the food remains
undigested and pass through the body. Consequently, people living on
such a diet seek out stimulants and turn to modern medicines which are
all hot (garmi) in their effect. Eastern traditions such as Ayruvedic or
Taoist medicine make the same analysis in terms of their own categories.
The Muslim tradition finds its authority in the Islamic revelation,
and uses terminology and concepts that are meaningful within Islamic
civilization, but the principles are universal. Garmi and sardi are essentially
the same principles as yin and yang, and the Eastern traditions too
understand nutrition as an alchemy of digestion requiring a balance of
these universal forces.

Traditional Cooking Methods
One of the characteristics of traditional methods of cooking is the tendency
to employ a small measure of heat for long periods of time. This is
particularly the case with grains which were often simmered for days
before being consumed. This was not only to soften the grain—a shorter
period of cooking would achieve that—but also to make it more digestible
and sustaining and to effect profound changes in the substance of
the grain. The modern, scientific approach to these matters reports the loss of vitamins and chemical nutrients in long cooking and recommends
raw or lightly cooked foods. The pace of modern life also tends to promote
quick and simple meals, zipped open and popped into a microwave
oven. But in China, India, Japan, the Middle East and in medieval
Europe meals were often cooked for long, not short, periods and special
qualities were said to have been imparted to foods prepared in these
ways. Time was considered an essential factor in nutrition. This is still
recognized in the case of foods like cheese and wine, which mature
over time, but it is no longer recognized as important to the preparation
of grain and vegetable foods. Traditional methods, found throughout
the world, typically take a whole grain such as wheat berries, cover in
water or broth, add a little salt, and seal in a heavy pot cooked over a
very low heat overnight or for several days. Other ingredients may be
added at particular stages of the cooking. Jewish cuisine knows several
dishes cooked for seven days, including the proverbial Chicken Soup
where a whole bird, head to feet, is boiled slowly for seven days until it
is reduced to a gelatinous liquid. This is indeed a type of domestic alchemy.
It recalls the long, slow cooking methods employed in the transmutations
of the alchemist. This is the dimension of which modern science
knows nothing. Traditional long cooking methods seek to transmute
food, not just warm it through. A similar intention lies behind the
Chinese practice of pickling eggs for extraordinary lengths of time, sometimes
hundreds of years. The egg is not just pickled, but transformed
into a new substance. These methods of food preparation are calculated
to manipulate garmi or sardi, yin or yang, and to transform the essence
of foodstuffs, not only their crude constituents.

Balance
The diets of so-called primitive peoples, hunter/gatherers, is characterized
by diversity. Neolithic remains preserved in peat-bogs reveal that
people then ate a fantastic array of seeds, roots, tubers, grubs, insects,
flowers and herbs, as well as fish and meat, all in small quantities. No
foodstuff predominated. The advent of civilizations, however, brought
the domestication of cereal grains which were used as staples. The diversity
of the primitive diet became the array of accompaniments—
sauces, dips, salads—to the bed of grain, rice, wheat, barley or maize,
that formed the foundation of the meal. The inherent balance of the diverse primitive diet was maintained by devising methods of concentrating
and enhancing foods. (The Jewish Chicken Soup, for instance,
distills a foraging bird with a naturally diverse diet down to its essence.)
Typically, meat consumption was irregular and connected with religious
observances; a legume accompanied the grain as a staple source of protein.
Rice and the soybean were the nutritional foundations of Chinese
civilization, like wheat and the chick pea in the Middle East and rice and
dhal or lentils in India. The modern, industrial Western diet, however,
deviates from this norm significantly. Meat—devoid of all religious associations
and prepared without responsibility to the creature or its Creator—
has become the focus of the meal, accompanied by a narrow selection
of vegetables and, very often, no grains whatsoever. The side dishes
have become the main event. The “balanced” meal described by modern
nutrition experts is balanced in terms of crude chemistry but not in
terms of the equilibrium crafted by the grain-based diets of the great,
traditional civilizations.

The Potato
The single most disruptive historical event bringing Western diets out of
step with traditional diets was the introduction of the potato from the
New World. Its introduction coincided with the era of skepticism and
materialism and the revolt against tradition. On a practical level, this
member of the nightshade family, poisonous in every part except its
tuber, became established as a grain substitute, and from that time forth
the European diet deviated from the traditional grain-based diet. In some
countries princes legislated to ban the traditional grain crops such as
rye—disrupting century-old patterns of agricultural life—and to make
the growing of the potato compulsory because, as a tuber, growing below
the surface of the soil, it was a crop relatively immune to the destruction
of invading armies. In some parts there was widespread resistance
to the introduction of the potato and suspicion about its value as a
food. Modern science reports on its starch and vitamin content, but the
traditional mind is more concerned with the fact that, unlike the sunloving
(vertical-growing) cereals, the potato grows by division (horizontally)
in the darkness of the soil and, in fact, hates the sun so much it
starts producing toxins in its skin on exposure to light. Photosynthesis is
a toxic process in the potato; in contrast to the grains it replaced it is a plant of the darkness.

Bread
Nothing illustrates the decline of the Western diet from traditional norms
more dramatically than the recent history of bread. The white, fluffy
stuff found on modern tables, alleged to be “bread”, bears no resemblance
to what was known as bread in traditional times, the “staff of
life”. Modern bread is a highly processed product that, if it contains any
goodness at all, has had it added in the form of synthetic vitamins and
reconstitutions of the very substances destroyed during processing. The
history of the decline of bread, however, has largely to do with rising
agents and leavens. Traditional breads were either sourdough risen or
unleavened. They were heavy and chewy and nutty in flavour and deeply
sustaining. In the 19th century, German chemists isolated strains of active
yeasts and the era of industrial bread, produced with a uniform rising
agent, began. The sourdough was a very local foodstuff. A batter is
exposed to the air and to whatever yeasts are in the region and allowed
to turn sour. This is then folded into the dough and left to rise after
kneading. In this way people developed a very specific acquaintance
with the microflora of their district, as the scientists would explain it.
Industrial or ‘German’ yeasts were produced in laboratories under controlled
conditions; the yeasts were pure monocultures and allowed a
uniform end-product that was lighter than any bread made from the comparatively
haphazard sourdough method. Further refining of the flour
allowed an even lighter bread until it became more of a confection than
a bread in any proper sense. Very soon, the taste and texture of traditional
breads was forgotten altogether. In more recent times this process
has gone even further so that now chemical rising agents have replaced
the German yeasts, ostensibly because they do the same job more cheaply
and more quickly and because, increasingly, people are intolerant to
the industrial strains of yeast. The sacred status of and the mysteries
associated with bread in various traditions need not be recounted in
detail here. We need only point out what an extraordinary spectacle it is
that the decline of bread sketched above could have occurred in a civilization
that in ancient times knew the cult of Demeter and the mysteries
of Eleusis and, for the last 2000 years, has had the Christian Eucharist, a
meal of bread, as its central and most solemn ritual.

Drinks
A number of other things also deserve to be mentioned as symptomatic
of the way dietary changes in the modern West parallel its deviation
from tradition in general. Modernity is thirsty; both metaphorically, for a
wisdom it no longer even suspects exists, and literally for a diet awash
with drinks. Other than the proliferation of McDonald’s restaurants, the
global reach of Coca Cola promotion is another emblem of the spread of
non-traditional, industrial foods. Traditional diets include far fewer liquids
than the typical modern, Western diet. This is largely because traditional
diets are grain based and a large portion of the necessary daily
liquids is consumed through the liquid absorbed through boiled or
steamed grains. There are far fewer liquids and far more salts in meat,
however, so the modern meat-based diet requires supplementary liquids,
usually in the form of sugared drinks and soda waters or plentiful
cups of tea and coffee. In traditional cultures, such as that of Japan, drinks
come in small cups and are infrequent. The notion that drinking large
quantities of liquid is a healthy practice is non-traditional. Traditional
understandings think of the human digestive system, as indicated above,
as like the athenor of the alchemist; popular opinion in the modern West
holds it to be a type of drainage system that needs to be flushed out
regularly. The subtle transmutations achieved by traditional cooking
methods are designed to duplicate and advance the processes of human
digestion. (In many languages the same word is used for cooking and to
describe the processes of digestion.) Many traditional foods, such as
soybean foods like the Japanese miso, or dairy foods such as yoghurt, or
brassica foods such as sauerkraut, are predigested ferments specially
adapted by traditional methods for human digestion. Their benefits, and
all but the crudest processes of digestion, are lost in a diet with a high
liquid intake. Alcoholic beverages, wine and beer, were once foods,
means of preserving juice and grains, again by means of live yeasts and
fermentation. Their decline and denaturing is evident from the fact that
these drinks today require artificial preservatives to keep them, a task
originally and properly belonging to the alcohol itself.

Salt
Related to the high liquid intake of the modern diet is a profoundly disturbed relationship between man and his most intimate contact with the
mineral realm, salt. Salt is the traditional, universal condiment of mankind,
essential for his survival and for his enjoyment of flavour, yet in
modern nutritional reckonings it is problematical and associated with
various modern diseases. This has to do, again, with the refining of the
modern table salt and its corruption with free-flowing agents and, again,
preservatives (as if salt, like alcohol, was not a preservative itself), and
to do with the high consumption of meat and animal-grade salts in the
modern diet. Traditional cultures understand better the proper, even
sacred, role of salt in the life of man and use it appropriately as a catalyst
to enhance the flavour of food rather than to mask its tastelessness, which
is the role of salt in industrial, processed foods. Salt is a bond of human
community. When Semitic food restrictions forbid the drinking of blood
they are, just as much, insisting upon a social order that ensures the
proper distribution of mineral or sea salt. According to the hadith, the
Prophet Muhammad began and finished every meal with a pinch of salt
and praised it as a blessed thing. It is a symbol of purity and wisdom.
Without the catalyst of salt the transmutations of traditional cooking
methods are without effect.

Conclusion
Interest in Eastern spirituality among dissatisfied Westerners is often accompanied
by the discovery of a different and more traditional type of
cuisine. This is a very immediate way in which they can experience
something of the traditional order for which they long. The traditional
culinary wisdom of the Chinese and Japanese no longer prevails in China
and Japan, but it is far more intact than traditional ways in the West. With
the necessary adjustments it is still possible to reconstruct many traditional
methods and recipes from their current corruptions. This is also
true of Middle Eastern cuisine. It has been corrupted with cane sugar (a
cold—sardi—form of sweetness, sweeteners normally being hot foods),
with stimulants (coffee), nightshades (tomatoes, aubergines) and, as in
Islamic culture generally, affluent urban living has led to the over-consumption
of meat, but it is still possible to discern the outlines of the
traditional diet, based on cereal grains (cous cous, burghul) and legumes
(fava beans, chick peas). In rural areas it is still possible to find
people cooking rich, grain-based stews using long, slow traditional cooking methods. These are the same areas where traditional craftsmen can
still be found crafting their wares and where sacred patterns, derived
from revelation, inform every aspect of life. They will tell you in these
parts that the fast of Ramadan is not only to remind the faithful of what it
is like to be hungry—a sociological and sentimental explanation—but
that it has mysterious effects upon the liver and the humors, and they
will recommend traditional Ramadan dishes that cleanse the organs of
the body and bring visions to the soul. There can be no doubt that modernity
brings with it a diet that is not only a product of profane
understandings but that makes men profane beings, insensitive to the
spiritual and isolated from the living forces of the cosmos. There is more
at stake in the foods we eat than refilling our inner test-tubes on a regular
basis or of avoiding carcinogens and other hazards, and there is more
to food in a sacred culture than simply saying “Grace” with meals. Industrial
foods are fodder for automatons, soulless food for the soulless.
This is not just a matter of health, but of a relation to the macrocosm, our
place as creatures in creation.